Japanese rewrite Guardian history

A pre-war Guardian correspondent who exposed the notorious Nanjing massacre by Japan's occupation army in China in 1937 has become the target of Japanese historians seeking to prove that it never took place.

Harold Timperley, the China correspondent of the Manchester Guardian (the newspaper's original name), chronicled the massacre in his dispatches from Shanghai and in a widely read book, The Japanese terror in China.

His cables reporting the massacre were censored by Japanese officials in Shanghai, provoking a diplomatic protest.

Timperley is accused of creating a "massacre myth" in a new book by a Japanese historian, Kitamura Minoru, who claims that he was an "agent of the Chinese Kuomintang" - the nationalist party then in government.

The conservative Japanese journal Shokun says he was part of a conspiracy "to present Japan in the role of absolute evil".

This revisionist version of history says that only a few thousand Chinese were killed and that most of them were soldiers in the defeated nationalist army.

Last week was the 30th anniversary of Tokyo's restoration of relations with Beijing, but as Japan becomes more concerned about China's new strength and influence, there is a ready market for reinterpretations of the past.

Timperley's book was based on the world of a small group of foreigners in Nanjing who risked their lives to protect thousands of civilians from rape and murder after the city - the capital of nationalist China - was occupied in December 1937.

Talked to survivors

One missionary saw 50 civilian corpses dumped in a pond and talked to survivors of groups who had been machine-gunned. Several of the foreigners physically dragged Japanese soldiers off the Chinese women they were raping.

Hundreds of disarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians who had worked for the army in a labour corps were roped together and killed.

The record of burials, said one observer quoted by Timperley, showed that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanjing, of whom some 30% had never been soldiers."

Timperley, an Australian journalist who had worked for the Guardian in China since 1928, was known for being dedicated to his work and fighting injustice. In Shanghai he organised medical aid for hundreds of apprentices who worked without pay in industrial sweatshops.

He urged help for the families of refugees from the Japanese invasion who were sleeping in alleyways "with only a thin ragged cotton blanket as protection".

As Japan turned to outright invasion after years of encroachment in northern China, he privately begged Britain to protest, hoping that a strong western line would deter conflict. Furious that British diplomats in Nanjing had gone on summer holiday despite the growing crisis, he accused the staff of "criminal negligence".

He married Elizabeth Chambers, a young American working in Nanjing, in between air-raids. "Our married life this far", he wrote to the Guardian, "has been punctuated by Japanese bombs."

They moved to Shanghai, from where Timperley reported Japan's campaign in the Yangtze delta. Later Ms Chambers took some of the secret reports from Nanjing by boat to the US.

"You can scarcely imagine the anguish and terror," wrote one informant quoted by Timperley in the Guardian. "Seventeen soldiers raped one woman successively in broad daylight. Practically every building in the city was robbed repeatedly."

The revisionist scholars accuse Timperley of inventing an improbably high total of 300,000 civilian deaths: the figure now used officially in China for the Nanjing massacre. The controversy about the number is then used to cast doubt on whether a massacre occurred at all.

But evidence found in the Guardian archives shows that Timperley used this figure to refer to the much larger number of civilian deaths throughout the Yangtze valley, rather than claiming that it was the death total for Nanjing alone.

In a crucial cable - the first of three censored by the Japanese in Shanghai - he wrote on January 16 1938: "[A] survey by one competent foreign observer indicates [that] in [the] Yangtze delta no less than 300,000 Chinese civilians [have been] slaughtered, [in] many cases [in] cold blood."

The cable was copied by the Japanese foreign office to its embassies, warning them to expect criticism of the massacre. But Timperley's reference to the Yangtze delta was omitted, and this misleading version is the one which has been misquoted ever since.

Villages destroyed

The publicity given to the Nanjing massacre obscured the fact that tens of thousands of civilians were killed elsewhere, and entire villages destroyed.

A recent study ( Scars of War, by Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnnon) said: "Hundreds of other massacres are still unrecognised by the outside world, and even by China itself."

Timperley's book, far from being "commissioned" by the Chinese intelligence service, as some Japanese scholars now insinuate, was prompted by members of the "international committee" of foreigners in Nanjing. It was they who asked him to cover other massacres in the delta area as well.

"We feel that there is a certain moral necessity to make known the terrible facts," a missionary, Miner Searle Bates, wrote. The book would help to "impress a distant public with the brutality of warfare waged as this one has been".

Timperley had, not surprisingly, developed close professional links with officials in the nationalist government during his work in China. The Guardian archives show that although he was critical of Chiang Kai-shek's "one-man-band" style of authoritarian rule, he was impressed by the "spirit of patience and fortitude" shown by the ordinary Chinese citizen.

He described how boy scouts and pedicab drivers carried the wounded in Shanghai to hospitals, where the volunteer nurses included former "taxi dancers" (prostitutes) who were working for nothing.

Timperley helped to set up a neutral "safety zone" in Shanghai with the support of local Japanese friends, which provided refuge for thousands of Chinese. Many other foreign correspondents felt sympathy for China in the face of what was seen as brutal aggression.

Timperley left journalism to become an adviser to the Chinese ministry of information in 1939, but continued to be consulted by the editor of the Guardian, WP Crozier. In 1943 he became a UN official, and after the war he worked in Indonesia. He died of a tropical disease in 1954.

His role in history had been largely neglected until it was disinterred by the Japanese revisionist offensive.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Tuesday October 15, 2002

Our story on the disputed scale of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 said that Harold Timperley, the Manchester Guardian's China correspondent, became a UN official in 1943. Since the United Nations was not formed until 1945, some clarification is necessary. The title of UN was adopted by the allied powers in a declaration of 1942. It was an agency of this organisation - the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration - that Timperley joined. UNRRA subsequently became part of the enlarged UN that we know today.